ABSTRACT
This chapter considers at length one of the products of readers' performances, the familiar category of inferences. The philosophy behind the minimalist hypothesis is that readers draw some limited range of inferences automatically, as a consequence of reading a text. Early research was intended to demonstrate more formally the structure of schemas and their use in narrative comprehension. In much research on narrative comprehension, individual performances have been induced through overt experimental manipulations. Several traditions of research on narrative worlds have converged on the single conclusion that the perception of causality is critical: experimentation has shown that comprehension is guided by the search for causal relations and that those causal relations, once recovered, provide much of the global coherence of memory representations. Social psychological research has turned up a number of circumstances in which causal judgments depart from strictly logical standards of impartiality.
